Mailund on the Internet

Gordon Brown apologizes for the treatment of Alan Turing:

2009 has been a year of deep reflection – a chance for Britain, as a nation, to commemorate the profound debts we owe to those who came before. A unique combination of anniversaries and events have stirred in us that sense of pride and gratitude which characterise the British experience. Earlier this year I stood with Presidents Sarkozy and Obama to honour the service and the sacrifice of the heroes who stormed the beaches of Normandy 65 years ago. And just last week, we marked the 70 years which have passed since the British government declared its willingness to take up arms against Fascism and declared the outbreak of World War Two. So I am both pleased and proud that, thanks to a coalition of computer scientists, historians and LGBT activists, we have this year a chance to mark and celebrate another contribution to Britain’s fight against the darkness of dictatorship; that of code-breaker Alan Turing.

Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of World War Two could well have been very different. He truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely. In 1952, he was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ – in effect, tried for being gay. His sentence – and he was faced with the miserable choice of this or prison – was chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones. He took his own life just two years later.

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It’s official, the swine flu has been upgraded to pandemic.

WHO chief Dr. Margaret Chan made the announcement Thursday after the U.N. agency held an emergency meeting with flu experts. Chan said she was moving the world to phase 6 — the agency’s highest alert level — which means a pandemic, or global epidemic, is under way.
“The world is moving into the early days of its first influenza pandemic in the 21st century,” Chan told reporters. “The (swine flu) virus is now unstoppable.”

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The last pandemic — the Hong Kong flu of 1968 — killed about 1 million people. Ordinary flu kills about 250,000 to 500,000 people each year.

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I have suffered from repetitive strain injury for years.  Got it during my PhD studies where I did a lot of programming.  I have some exercises that helps, but other than that there is only resting from sitting at the computer that alleviates it.  Normally this works fine, and since I am not doing as much late night programming as I used to do, it is not a major handicap.

The last two weeks, though, it has been pretty bad, so I have been off blogging.  I’m slowly recovering, so I guess it is time to slowly get back…

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Yes, people are still talking about the pig flu:

• How long does it take to sequence an influenza virus? (Aetiology)
• Flu news you can use (Neuron Culture)
• Nonoptimal virulence and avian influenza (Mike the Mad Biologist)
• World Health Organization raises pandemic alert level (Ars Technica)

It is all over the news these days, the swine flu from Mexico.  The US has declared an emergency and the first cases have appeard in Europe.

How bad can it get?  Pretty bad, actually.

We are better prepared than we were in 1918, but still, we also travel a lot more, so a pandemic can spread fast if measures are not taken.

With the scare of the bird flu the last couple of years, one would hope that goverments are prepared, but of course it can also end up with a “boy that cried wolf” situation where people do not take the flu serious enough.

This might be a bad time to go to a busy airport, but I’m off to Heathrow now…

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